Whaaaaa?
By Kathleen Bolton | October 21, 2007 |
He’s out of the closet at last:
After reading briefly from her mega-selling book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, on Friday night, Rowling took questions from an audience of 1,600 students. A 19-year-old from Colorado asked about the avuncular headmaster of Hogwarts School: ‘Did Dumbledore, who believed in the prevailing power of love, ever fall in love himself?’
The author replied: ‘My truthful answer to you…I always thought of Dumbledore as gay.’ The audience reportedly fell silent – then erupted into prolonged applause.
Rowling, 42, continued: ‘Dumbledore fell in love with Grindelwald [a bad wizard he defeated long ago], and that added to his horror when Grindelwald showed himself to be what he was. To an extent, do we say it excused Dumbledore a little more because falling in love can blind us to an extent, but he met someone as brilliant as he was and, rather like Bellatrix, he was very drawn to this brilliant person and horribly, terribly let down by him.’
Pretty cool, no?
Kathleen Bolton is co-founder of Writer Unboxed. She writes under a variety of pseudonyms, including Ani Bolton.
She has written two novels as Cassidy Calloway: Confessions of a First Daughter, and Secrets of a First Daughter–both books in a YA series about the misadventures of the U.S. President’s teen-aged daughter, published by HarperCollins, and Tamara Blake, for the novel Slumber.
I read this over the weekend! Shocker, huh?
What impresses me to no end is the depth of knowledge Rowling has had about her characters from such an early stage. There are worlds out there she hasn’t revealed yet. I’m sure this sort of thing will propel people to buy her Encyclopedia of Wizarding History when the time comes.
I never thought I’d like her universe more, and then she adds another layer to make it even more authentic. Now I’ll have to re-read those Grindlewald scenes for the subtext.